Charles Davis May 21, 2017:

@Robert Sorry I never got back to you on this. Perhaps epígrafe is a more normal word in Spain than in Latin America, and specifically in this metonymic sense whereby a heading comes to mean the section that it heads. I'm very familiar with it in that sense, from academic writing but also from bureaucratic language in Spain, as neilmac mentioned, so it seemed to me clearly the best word in the context. Yes, you can speak of dividing a document into headings, but by implication the headings include the text written under them. And in this text, referring to "seis epígrafes en los que se evalúa la situación en cada provincia", I think it's clear that the situation is assessed in the text rather than literally in the headings themselves.

You did say "heading or section" in your explanation and perhaps I should have agreed with it on that account. I sometimes find it difficult to decide whether posting another answer in these circumstances is ethical or not. Sorry if I made the wrong decision in this case :)

Robert Carter May 9, 2017:

@Charles I've seen the word used in certain contexts, mostly legal, to denote "hereinabove", which in itself, you must surely admit, is at least slightly fancy, but I've never seen it used instead of "sección" or "encabezado" or "título", although that's probably indicative of my ignorance of Spanish academic writing. Just to be clear, I certainly don't think there's anything wrong with fancy.

Now, if, as Kathryn says, you don't divide text into headings, then you wouldn't divide them into epígrafes either. I actually don't think this is the case though and neither does the Oxford:

‘The document is divided into three main headings.’
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/heading

By the way, if you read past the "fancy" part, you may notice that I said "heading or section" in my answer too :-)

neilmac May 9, 2017:

It's also a tax term My heart sinks and my eyes glaze over every time I hear the word "epigrafe" in relation to my tax affairs...

Charles Davis May 8, 2017:

epígrafe In Spain, at least, this is not a fancy word at all; it's an absolutely standard word for a heading in a text. Etymologically it means something "written above".

By extension, it means a section of a text (that is, the part of the text headed by the epígrafe). It seems to me that this is the meaning here.

And as well as a heading, in the sense of a title, it can also mean an epigraph, which can be either a summary of a chapter or section written at the beginning, or a quotation or saying placed at the head of a text, typically flushed right (the former has rather gone out of fashion; the latter is still quite common in academic writing, at least in the humanities).